The last post got me thinking about older advertising about tea, and I found these examples via History World.

• The original PG Tips, from 1951 and 1952.
  
• Harden’s tea, from 1950.
  
• Co-op tea, from 1936 and 1937.
  
• Proof that tea has always been subject to unproven claims about its health benefits.
  
• And here apparently is the tea that Members of Parliament drank under Queen Victoria.
  

Here are some tea commercials from around the world, which I found on YouTube. Most of the tea commercials on YouTube seem to be for iced tea - iced tea can be good or bad, but either way it’s where the money is in tea these days, hence the number of advertisements for it. These are all links to videos…

• Caterpillars looking for those buds.
• Wizard of Oz in Spain.
• Sex sells even tea. More sex. Trust me, there are a lot of these nubile Asian women selling tea on YouTube.
• If this is real, it is the strangest tea advertisement I have seen.
• Celebrities aren’t picky … Britney and Eric.
• And of course the Brooke Bond chimpanzees. Brooke Bond (now Unilever) created PG Tips tea. PG stands for Pre-gestee, but I don’t know what that means.

The last in our series on smoking tea takes an interesting turn.

We’ve looked at smoked tea, and tea smoked food. There are, regretably, those amongst us, poor misguided teenagers alas, who seem to enjoy smoking tea, as though it were tobacco. And yes, you are correct to slap your forehead in dismay. Don’t try this at home! Our tea is for drinking, not for putting in a pipe!

There are a few chat room forums devoted to this intriguing and overlooked area of tea consumption. On smoking green tea, either rolled up or in a pipe, the reports are various and range from: ‘I tried it today and I felt kind of high, but I had a hard time smoking it as it wouldn’t stay in the pipe’, to ‘all I had was a slight buzz, not worth the effort’, to ‘it didn’t do anything except give me a splitting headache’. One gentleman complains that there is no website for dedicated tea smokers. Tippyleaf would like to throw a cold stare of contempt at these tea abusers. The thought of this coven of ‘tea smokers’, frankly, gives me the shivers. What a waste of fine tea! In fact, I need a cuppa right now to calm myself.

Tippyleaf would, however, recommend drinking tea instead of smoking cigarettes: why not replace a malign addiction with a healthy one! Of course there is no scientific evidence to suggest that tea can actually help conquer nicotine addiction (though one website believes very strongly, albeit holistically in the possible link. It can’t do any harm, methinks, to replace the feeling of relaxation one derives from nicotine with the more transcendent calm of our sublime green tea. Or even smoked tea. Which brings us full circle.

A follow-on from the previous post on smoked teas, where I talked about the smoking process involved in such teas as lapsang souchong, withering the leaves over a pine or cedar fire, which gives the tea its powerful woody, smoky taste. With this we are familiar. But how about the process of tea smoked food?

The principle is similar, in that tea smoked food originates from the need to preserve food, just as tea smoking came from the need to preserve tea during long distance trade routes. There are several ancient methods of preserving food, including the use of salt, and drying techniques, but the advent of refrigeration of course changed all that. To preserve food, we keep it frozen. However, the ancient Chinese method of tea smoking, although no longer used for preservation, is still practiced as an advanced culinary technique, for the richness of flavour it can achieve.

Tea leaves are burnt and the smoke is used to instil the food with a luxurious flavour. The method works especially well on poultry and fish.

Here are some recipes you might like to try:

• Tea smoked fish slices
• Tea smoked salmon with wasabi latkes
• Tea smoked chicken with lemon salad
  

Spotted this recently in the trade news. Tea trading between India and Russia seems to be taking off again in a big way. During the, ahem, glory years of the Soviet Union, 50 per cent of tea into Russia came from India; but since the end of communism, Indian exports of tea to Russia fell dramatically. But the historic commerce between the two countries is being sparked up once more, and the Indian government is aiming for a $10 billion trade turnover target with Russia by 2010.

Reading about this, I can’t help but hark back to the romance of nineteenth century tea trading, and how, even further back, the invention of new teas arose from this long distance trading. The trade in tea between China and Russia, for instance, required the smoking of teas such as lapsang souchong and Russian tea. The latter tea originates in China, and has a similarly distinct smoky flavour to lapsang souchong; it takes its name from the method of trading between the two countries, which involved the use of camel or mule caravans for transport. These journeys of course take their time, so the tea would be smoked, which involved a special process to preserve the leaves over a period of several months. Smoking the tea also created, from this necessity, a whole new taste: that robust, woody, oakey flavour, which gives that extra kick.

Actually, I can think of another China-Russia cross-breed, with its own kick, from which the Indians, in their rekindled relations with Russia, could take inspiration:

Many us like a drop of milk in our tea. So accustomed are we to that drop, that for many of us, tea without milk is an unthinkable prospect. But hands up who pays any attention to the precise amount of milk we pour into the mug? I thought so. We rely on intuition alone, we just know how much to put in according to our tastes. Agreed. But, I’ll bet you can recall, maybe as recently as the other day,  pouring a smidgeon too much milk, for whatever reason, for instance, problems with hand-eye co-ordination first thing in the morning. Getting exactly the right amount of milk in one’s cup, the more one thinks about it, is not as precise as we’d like to think. We rely on the changing colour of the tea, as much as how much milk we think we’ve poured, before we decide when to stop. And sometimes, we accidently end up with a cup almost imperceptibly milkier than we’d have preferred. Admit it. There’s no shame. It happens. With that in mind, have a look at this little invention, and let me know: gimmick or not? I think it’s quite useful. It colour coordinates the tea-milk ratio so you get it bang on everytime. No matter what kind of state you’re in in the morning.